Best Practices of Application Maintenance and Support Services in 2023
The Application Maintenance and Support Services is a product of technology and involves various mechanisms, workflows, features, functionalities, and technological intellect. These elements demand timely updates, maintenance to keep up with your continually evolving expectations, and to help you maintain competence. Application maintenance, therefore, constitutes a critical element of every business.
Application maintenance does not limit itself to fixing defects or resolving errors. It transcends these basic functions to modify the product to rectify faults, keep it secure, and also augment its performance. Besides, application maintenance also involves a comprehensive study of the existing applications to determine areas of improvement and address them in the right manner.
5 Best Application Maintenance Practices
The five best Application Maintenance and Support Services practices will not only help the maintenance team streamline their work, but also enable the users to plan their deliverables that, perhaps, depend considerably on the availability and efficiency of the software application that they use.
1. Preparing and Following a Maintenance Time Table
Of course, you cannot schedule a maintenance patch overnight, and announce an application outage the next day, leaving users confused, and annoyed! You must plan the maintenance schedule well in advance and communicate it with the users to enable them to plan their work accordingly. It’s a small step, but a crucial one, as it contributes to user experience and impacts deliverables.
Prioritizing Issue Fixing
The first thing you do when you receive the notification about a maintenance release is to go through your list of issues to fix. The ones that users raise, and those affecting user experience, and regular operations must constitute your priority. Such a practice helps you determine the urgency and decide when you must apply the patches, particularly when you’ve got maintenance patches for a lot of other elements releasing around the same time.
Here, the key is to think from the user’s angle. The maintenance team must ask a few vital questions assessing the advantage of fixing the issue, and the risk factor involved in not fixing it immediately, or perhaps, the consequences of delaying for it sometime. When you’ve got a lot to fix and maintain, you must take up issues that relate to users first, and then determine the order of the others.
3. Testing the Maintenance Updates
Now that you’ve completed the maintenance part, you must test it to compute its effectiveness. It is good to begin with testing maintenance updates in a non-production replica environment.
So, how do you go about it? Do a control test with applying any maintenance updates, and then apply a single maintenance update and run the test suite once again.
These tests aim at two things — verifying behavioral changes as per the expectations and to confirm that no undesirable or unexpected changes were observed after the process.
It is desirable to perform all these steps in a non-production maintenance window, as it will allow you to calculate the time the system required to apply the update and time it took to complete it.
Benefits of Application Maintenance
Let us highlight some of the surefire benefits of regular application maintenance.
- Maintain optimal application performance at all times
- Proactive bug fixing
- Optimized functionalities
- Align the application with the latest trends and competencies
- Improved lifecycle, and increased application life
- Keep the application downtime to the minimum
- Improved data security
- Reset annual support costs through the elimination of redundant functionalities (full or partial)
